The Los Angeles Times has a major report on the number of civilians killed in airstrikes, both by the United States and its coalition partners in Mosul. Molly Hennessy-Fiske and W.J. Hennigan write:

A recent airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq is believed to have caused more than 270 civilian deaths, a tragedy that provoked an international outpouring of grief and outrage. But the uproar over the March 17 deaths in the Jadidah neighborhood of Mosul masks a grim reality: Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of other civilians have died in hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during the war against Islamic State, and it appears likely that the vast majority of those deaths were never investigated by the U.S. military or its coalition partners. It also appears that the number of civilian casualties has risen in recent months as combat has shifted to densely populated west Mosul and the coalition has undertaken the heaviest bombing since the war began almost three years ago.

It is true that civilian deaths have increased, but the complaint that the United States must do more to investigate such deaths is misplaced for two reasons:

First, there was a cost to the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from Iraq that President Obama ordered in 2011. The idea that Iraq would not allow U.S. forces to remain because the Iraqi government would not grant immunity is nonsense. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki offered immunity, but the State Department insisted that such immunity be granted by the Iraqi parliament, something both Washington and Baghdad understood was a political nonstarter.

As Maliki complained to me during a subsequent meeting, “The United States would not take yes for an answer.” In effect, the White House had to cho0se between ‘shock and awe’ and Stalingrad. They defaulted to the latter by removing the ability to gather the intelligence and targeting data necessary to act with precision. It is tragic that civilians die, but the moral responsibility for their death lies with the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) and not with the United States or its allies. (Likewise, it is morally obtuse when critics of the Iraq war claim that the United States caused 100,000 or more Iraqi deaths. The reality is that Iranian-backed militias and Iraqi insurgents did so; American forces put their lives on the line to defeat those engaged in mass murder).

Secondly, the battle for Mosul foreshadows a growing problem as megacities become ground zero for 21st-Century counterterrorism operations. Consider Pakistan: Whereas once al-Qaeda ensconced itself in the rugged mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it now seeks refuge in the dense urban centers of southern Punjab. Neither the Pakistani government nor, frankly, the local populations would ever willingly allow U.S. forces to conduct counterterrorism operations in the region, which means future counterterror operations will be conducted by air, with the inevitable risk of collateral damage.

Media savvy extremist groups are aware of the Western aversion to such casualties and will not hesitate to cause them after the fact: The U.S. bombs a weapons factory with precision? Why not quickly blow up a surrounding apartment building and blame it on the West? They realize that the truth is secondary to public perception.

What to do? Alas, there may not be any good option. The United States military cannot become so risk averse as to grant terrorists safe haven. Nor in an age of declining budgets can the Pentagon hire an analytical army to investigate every death, however unfortunate each may be. Terrorists operate in contravention to the Geneva Conventions prohibiting shelter in civilian areas. That is simply a fact of life. It’s unfortunate, but one to which journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats will have no choice but to become adjusted.

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Today, American soldiers are deployed on sovereign foreign soil without the authorization of the host government. In fact, they’re often in conflict with forces loyal to that government. This is a condition we used to call an invasion. To call it what is, though, would be to shatter a convenient fiction.

It’s been over two years since President Barack Obama authorized the introduction of U.S. boots on the ground in Syria. Eighteen months have elapsed since U.S. forces first clashed with troops loyal to Damascus. During this time, the clashes between U.S. forces and those loyal to Damascus (and Moscow) have increased in intensity and frequency. Moreover, as predicted, with the ISIS threat melting away, the Syrian battlefield is transforming into a contest between the great powers that have a claim to the spoils of that fight. Today, Syrians, Americans, Islamists, Kurds, Russians, Turks, Iranians, and sundry proxy forces are all operating in the same theater, shooting in different directions.

Congress has had many opportunities to take up an authorization that would sanction the executive branch’s use force in Syria, both against non-state actors and the regime in Damascus. It has failed to execute its constitutionally delineated authority, preferring instead to cede that power to the executive branch. By failing to provide guidance to two administrations that wanted nothing more than to avoid involvement in Syria, Congress has allowed negligence and pusillanimity to reign. The result is chaos and crisis.

This is a matter of propriety, not legality. The Trump White House has complied with the feeble and constitutionally dubious War Powers Resolution. The Congressional Democrats and transparency groups are demanding that the White House make public a secret internal memo that supposedly expands on this administration’s view of its legal authority to wage wars abroad with virtually no input from Congress. The indignation on the part of administration critics in the legislature is noteworthy, but that’s about it. There’s nothing nefarious about the White House consulting with itself on war powers, particularly considering the freedom of action it derives from congressional lethargy. Capitol Hill could render this memorandum moot any time it wishes. All it would have to do is take up a resolution authorizing the conflict in Syria that defines the parameters in which the U.S. should operate and the objectives it seeks to achieve.

This is, of course, all a sad academic exercise. Congress has no intention of preserving its authority when it comes to the expeditionary force in Syria. No lawmaker wants to be compelled by public opposition to that ill-defined conflict to vote against a resolution authorizing America’s necessary mission in the Levant. That’s political reality, but it’s not leadership. This president displayed more courage than his predecessor when he explained to the public last year why containing the Assad regime with force was in the national interest—a conclusion the Obama administration shared but was too timid to say out loud. Congress failed to ratify the Trump administration’s approach to this crisis. That was a mistake, but it does not have to become an inviolable precedent. Congress has the opportunity to rectify this error today by taking up a resolution authorizing force against North Korea.

This week, United States envoy Robert Wood reiterated the administration’s belief that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is “only months away” from achieving the capacity to deliver a nuclear warhead to the mainland of the United States. Simultaneously, it is developing a second strike capability that can survive preemptive action. The administration sees these as intolerable outcomes and it might use force to prevent it from coming to pass. Whether that is a viable course of action or not, the president is acting it as though it were. It is therefore incumbent on the Congress to behave accordingly.

Recently, behind-the-scenes whispers about the prospect of a “bloody nose” option for North Korea have grown louder. That would consist of a limited airstrike on Kim Jong-un’s nuclear facilities and delivery vehicles. Because the U.S. views the Kim regime as rational and believes its survival is its highest priority, it is assumed that Pyongyang might not respond to a strike as long as the U.S. broadcasted the limits of its scope. To retaliate would invite a much larger war, which the regime would not survive.

This is certainly a fraught prospect based on a lot of untested presumptions. If war were again to come to the Korean Peninsula, it would be too late to debate the prospects for mission success or failure, to say nothing of the threat posed by inaction. This Republican-dominated Congress would surely prefer to control the terms of that debate. If Democrats retake one or both chambers of the legislature, they will be leading this discussion on terms far less favorable for the administration.

The result of a Democrat-led debate on war powers is likely to result in legal encumbrances that would render it difficult if not impossible for the administration to entirely neutralize the North Korean threat. The unique suspicion this president inspires among Democratic voters coupled with widespread resentment toward the process that led so many Democrats to approve an authorization of force against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2002 will put pressure on opposition party members they may be unable to resist. These conditions will transform a good-faith debate over the necessity of a strike on North Korea into a cheap political exercise.

When power is on the table, it does not stay on the table for long. The Constitution vests in Congress the authority to legitimize the use of force abroad. If the Republican-led legislature doesn’t exercise its authority, Democrats someday will. If that day comes, it would pay to be prepared. Syria has already gone pear-shaped. A desperate effort on the part of the Obama administration to avoid entanglement in that conflict led to the worst possible outcome: a failed state and a contest among great powers to rule the rubble. A prelude to a conflict on the Korean Peninsula in which political expediency was valued over preparedness risks inviting a disaster that would make Syria look like small potatoes.

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“As you know, we’re under siege,” President Donald Trump told the rapt attendees of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference last June. The audience heard “we,” but the president was likely speaking about himself. The president’s persecution complex is infectious and it’s leading Republicans around Trump to make decisions they will regret for years to come.

Most presidencies tend to develop a siege mentality over time, but the Trump administration appeared to enter office with a chip on its shoulder. It was an accidental presidency in those early days, improvisational and reckless. It was burdened with vainglorious sponges who whose egos exceeded their abilities. Most of all, it was paranoid. Those criticisms the president and his administration endured in the early months were earned, but that made for an insular organization fixated on loyalty and tribal moiety. It didn’t help matters that the president who managed affairs was himself prone to conspiratorial thinking. From the political press to the “deep state” to the president’s own Justice Department, Trump’s imagined enemies haunted him.

Despite the defenestration of most of the sycophants that staffed the nascent Trump administration and reinforced the president’s paranoia, the bunker mentality persists. This predisposition has several effects. It has instilled in Trump’s supporters the same cageyness that afflicts the president. It has also led the White House to close ranks even to its own detriment. That impulse perhaps explains the bizarre and sordid story involving the belated resignation of White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter.

Porter allegedly beat women. According to a Daily Mail report published Wednesday, he emotionally and physically abused his ex-wives—one of whom provided photographic evidence to prove it, which she also shared with the FBI. Porter purportedly tore one former spouse naked from a shower, forced his hand through panes of glass in fits of rage, and compelled another ex-wife to seek legal redress after he violated the terms of their separation agreement by menacing her in her apartment. The temporary protective order she received in 2010 concluded that “reasonable grounds exist to believe that [Porter] has committed family abuse and there is probable danger of a further such offense.” The White House knew about all of this. The FBI informed the White House of the allegations against Porter as early as November. One of Porter’s ex-girlfriends expressed her concerns about him directly to White House counsel Don McGahn. Still, it’s principals rallied to Porter’s side.

“Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him,” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly initially said of his deputy in a statement released Wednesday. “I am proud to serve alongside him.” The statement was reportedly co-drafted by White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who was involved in a romantic relationship with Porter. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed Kelly, calling Porter a man of “the highest integrity and exemplary character.” If Porter had to go, the plan was for him to stay on for at least several more weeks. But the demands for Porter’s job grew louder when it was revealed by unnamed officials in the White House that Kelly was aware of the charges against Porter, which is one of the reasons why his deputy had repeatedly failed to obtain a security clearance. Nevertheless, officials inside and outside the White House urged Porter to “stay and fight.”

Porter’s better judgment eventually prevailed. According to reports, he determined that he had become an unnecessary distraction and submitted his resignation. Thus, more than 24 hours after providing a statement in support of Porter on the record, Kelly issued another statement condemning him. “I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter,” the new dispatch read. “There is no place for domestic violence in our society.”

Only the kind of tunnel vision typical of life in the bunker can explain the nearsightedness that led the White House to think it could cover up a scandal like this and then weather the storm once it was exposed. Only if you have convinced yourself that your critics are beyond reason would you fail to see the obvious pitfalls associated with circling the wagons around an alleged serial abuser. John Kelly brought order to a chaotic West Wing. He’s an honorable figure who imposed sobriety on an atmosphere that was freewheeling and unserious. But he, too, succumbed to the myopia with which everyone with a siege mentality suffers.

The political impact of this debacle might not be short-lived. John Kelly’s position is in jeopardy. His resignation would suit those in Trump’s orbit who want to see a return to those early chaotic days of the administration. The Republican Party, too, has suffered a terrible setback. Democrats argued in bad faith that the GOP tacitly supported abusing women when some Republican senators opposed the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 because, among other things, it encouraged local police responding to a domestic disturbance call to make a “mandatory arrest” of someone—anyone—and flirted with unconstitutionality by allowing non-Native Americans accused of assault to be tried in tribal courts. Today, Democrats no longer have to stretch so hard to make the “anti-women” accusations stick.

The wagon-circling around Porter is a familiar sort of corruption. It’s the same impulse that led Trump’s allies to back former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore against his many accusers because, in the words of Breitbart’s Alex Marlow, to fail to do so would “create a standard” of acceptable conduct with women that Trump himself could not match. It’s the same degeneracy that led the president to wrestle with how forcefully to condemn violent white supremacists because some of them might have beenhis white supremacists. It’s the same brazen wantonness that leads respectable Republicans to chase flimsy conspiracy theories down rabbit holes, sacrificing invaluable credibility and transforming their constituents into fevered paranoiacs in the process.

The affair involving Rob Porter is only a symptom of a malady afflicting the Republican Party. As long as it is dug in with Donald Trump in the bunker, these unforced errors will continue and the GOP will suffer as a result.

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stumbled into controversy this week, although it was perhaps unwarranted. Trudeau became the subject of derision and mockery when he interrupted a woman at a town hall to correct her use of the term “mankind,” suggesting that she replace this dated designation with the more inclusive “peoplekind.” He only offered his proposal after enduring several minutes of a rambling new-age monologue regarding the chemical composition of “maternal love.” Trudeau’s interjection was probably flippant, but neither his interlocutor nor his critics seemed to notice. It’s hard to blame them.

When it comes to subservience to the many demands that identity politics makes on language and behavior, Canada’s prime minister takes a back seat to no one. It’s only prudent to assume Trudeau’s mawkishness is earnest. What’s more, the fact that “gendered” nouns and pronouns, including “mankind,” find themselves in the censors’ crosshairs isn’t exactly news. The popular grammar-checking program Grammarly flags “mankind” for “possible gender-biased language” and suggests more neutral substitutes like “humankind” or “humanity.” Learning to love unidiomatic expressions and consigning gender-specific language to history is a fixation of political activists posing as academicians, even if legitimate etymological scholars cannot support these arguments by citing linguistic corpora. Those who resent an increasingly overbroad definition of what constitutes offensive language are primed for a fight.

Language policing has been the stock-in-trade of a particular type of activist for decades, much to the consternation of both conservatives and liberals interested more in clarity than conformity. Recently, though, the intramural debate on the left over the limited utility of scrutinizing potentially objectionable speech rather than the ideas conveyed by that speech has been relegated to the back burner. That’s for a good reason.

Donald Trump’s presidency, much like his candidacy, is a brusque counterattack against “PC culture.” Often, what Trump and his supporters call “politically incorrect” language is just plain rudeness. The value of the kind of speech they find delightfully provocative isn’t its concision but its capacity to offend the right people. Thus, some self-styled arbiters of linguistic enlightenment might be tempted to dismiss Trump’s campaign against ambiguous semantics as nothing more than a brutish primal scream. If so, they would have failed to properly appreciate the threat Trump and the presidential pulpit he commands represent to their capacity to shape the terms of the debate through language. Trump isn’t limited to displays of rhetorical brute force. Sometimes, he and his speechwriters are capable of compelling eloquence.

Amid a blizzard of FBI texts, dueling intelligence committee memos, and legalisms regarding the oversight of America’s necessarily secretive espionage courts, the State of the Union address has all but been forgotten in Washington. It’s less likely, though, that a well-received speech watched by at least 46 million Americans will be so quickly forgotten across the country. And that should concern liberals because if there was any single line in that speech that won’t be overlooked, it was one that cuts at the heart of the Democratic Party’s ability to lay claim to the moral high ground. “My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities and their right to the American dream,” Trump said. “Because Americans are dreamers, too.” This was a masterful line. Its potency has been underestimated, and not just by those who resent the restrictive immigration policies it was designed to advance.

The name of the bipartisan 2001 “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act” transgressed a little in order to achieve a lot for the children of illegal immigrants brought into the U.S. as minors. Referring to this demographic as “alien” is taboo, and an offense against modern sensibilities. But to describe them as “DREAMers” yields a windfall of sympathy for this already deserving group of largely naturalized non-citizens. Trump’s turn of phrase spreads the dreaming around, thus diluting the designation DREAMer of much of its unique sympathy.

Democrats might have missed the significance of this expression amid their irritation over another set phrase in that speech: “chain migration.” Trump’s use of this term during the State of the Union Address to describe the process by which legal immigrants sponsor members of their extended family to become American citizens elicited boos from Democrats. Many implied the phrase is a new invention with racist connotations, but the term has been used by policymakers (including some of these same Democrats) for decades. Maybe it was the self-evident hypocrisy, or maybe it was the contrived effort to move the goalposts. For whatever reason, the Democrats’ campaign to label “chain migration” a racist term landed with a thud. Time was that the left could dictate the terms of a debate by controlling the language of its participants, but their grip on the national dialogue may be slipping. The power of the presidency—you’ll forgive the expression—trumps the braying of the pedantic opposition.

The energy expended by political activists on policing speech is not wasted; dictating the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable discourse is a profitable and productive enterprise. If the right is getting into the game, they’re only following a course forged by their political adversaries.

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In the space of a single month, the Syrian regime has reportedly deployed chlorine gas in civilian neighborhoods on six separate occasions. The Trump administration admirably declined to look away. The State Department demanded that the world “speak with one voice” in condemning these attacks, and was particularly hard on Syria’s benefactors in Moscow. “Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the victims in East Ghouta and countless other Syrians targeted with chemical weapons since Russia became involved in Syria,” said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Let’s suppose, though, that the world does not speak with one voice on Syria. What then? The Trump administration cannot now fall back on perfunctory statements of disapproval amid mass murder using chemical weapons. That is, unless this White House is prepared to abandon the laudable precedent it has set in defense of the defenseless.

Donald Trump did not waste time censuring Damascus in April of 2017, following reports that 80 civilians were subsequently killed and another 400 injured in a chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. The president acted.

“Tonight, I ordered a targeted military stroke on the air base in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched,” Trump said. “Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed.” Trump proceeded to connect the global instability that has resulted from the metastatic Syrian civil war to the crimes against humanity executed by Assad and defended by the regime’s allies. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons,” Trump concluded. He was correct; it would be a tragic shame if this administration proved they never meant a word of it.

The 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles that targeted aircraft, shelters, radar and air defense, ammunition bunkers, and fuel stores at the Al Shayrat airfield were dismissed as inconsequential by the Trump administration’s critics. They alleged that the strike was too small to have any lasting effect on Assad regime behavior, particularly since the administration informed Russia ahead of the strikes, which allowed for the evacuation of Syrian military personnel from the strike zone. But the targeted missile strikes did have the effect of deterring the Assad regime from using chemical weapons against civilians, and not just the Sarin that was used on Khan Sheikhoun; chlorine, too.

Amid reports that Syria was preparing another chemical attack on civilian populations, the White House confronted the threat early. “[If] Mr. Assad conducts another mass-murder attack using chemical weapons,” former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer warned in June, “he and his military will pay a heavy price.” These threats worked. At least, for a time.

That time has passed. Today, surface-to-surface missiles containing chlorine gas are raining down on populous towns like Saraqeb in Idlib Province and the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. The United Nations is still investigating these attacks, but it has blamed Damascus for similar chlorine strikes on civilians in the recent past. Despite disappearing from the headlines in the West, the situation in Syria is growing worse by the day. The fighting is flaring up again, and civilians are suffering. “Humanitarian diplomacy seems to be totally impotent, we’re getting nowhere,” United Nations humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said last week. He added that Assad’s forces had prevented UN humanitarian relief missions from accessing certain besieged areas, and aid convoys have not reached some parts of Syria in two months.

The Trump administration now faces a moment of truth. It could preserve the moral authority it purchased after declining to merely scold the Syrian regime for deploying weapons of mass destruction against civilians, or it could retreat into a defensive crouch and act like the Syrian regime’s de facto defense counsel. That, to their everlasting shame, was the Obama administration’s approach to the use of chlorine munitions in Syria.

At a May 2015 press conference in which he defended his administration’s efforts to secure a deal to stall Iran’s nuclear weapons development, Barack Obama was asked about reports of over 30 chlorine bombings in Syria in the space of just two months. His response was devoid of moral clarity. “We have seen reports about the use of chlorine in bombs that have the effect of chemical weapons,” Obama told reporters. “Chlorine itself is not listed as a chemical weapon, but when it is used in this fashion, can be considered a prohibited use of that particular chemical.” He went on to say that addressing the potential use of chemical weapons was a job for the international community and Russia, and added that the deal he made with Moscow that supposedly neutralized Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile was a wild success. “Those have been eliminated,” Obama insisted.

Chlorine is a dual-use chemical that has industrial applications and, as such, is not subject to the same global prohibition that nerve agents like Sarin and VX are. But the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons lists chlorine as a choking agent with potentially lethal battlefield applications. This revelation should surprise no one who has a cursory familiarity with the events of World War I.

The last administration’s efforts to downplay the severity of chlorine attacks in Syria were grotesque. Obama’s appeal to Russia as a source of relief for the people of Syria—a nation that now actively blocks the international community’s efforts to extend the mandate of chemical weapons inspectors in Syria—was craven.

The last administration wanted to avoid the demands that history made on it, and it was a disgrace. Will the Trump administration abandon the course correction it embarked upon last April? Will it retreat to the same obtuse legalisms to which Obama appealed, even as the worst humanitarian and military crisis of this century intensifies? Will this president shirk his duty to humanity and to history, too?

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The legacy of the Shoah in Poland, John Paul II said, is “a wound that has not healed, one that keeps bleeding.” The Polish government’s new Holocaust law rubs salt into the wound and renders healing that much more elusive.

The law, which is expected to be signed into law on Tuesday by Polish President Andrzej Duda, criminalizes historical claims of Polish responsibility for the Holocaust and the use of “Polish death camps” and similar expressions. Violators face up to a year in prison. The Trump administration has condemned the move on free-speech grounds. “If enacted this draft legislation could undermine free speech and academic discourse,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement last month. “We all must be careful not to inhibit discussion and commentary on the Holocaust.” The move, it warned the ruling Law and Justice party, risks straining Warsaw’s relationships with its allies in Washington and Jerusalem.

That is all correct. But the law’s most lamentable casualty is the bond of Polish-Jewish friendship that had only recently been restored thanks to the courageous efforts of figures on both sides of the divide. The restoration, as serious Jews and Poles would admit, was far from complete. Yet it had already born fruit: among them growing diplomatic warmth between Israel and Poland and a mini-renaissance of Jewish life in cities like Krakow. These achievements required “willingness and openness in treating difficult and painful problems of the past” and “brotherly dialogue,” as Archbishop Henryk Muszyński, then the primate of Poland, put it in a moving 1997 address on Polish-Jewish relations.

Now, in a misguided attempt to vindicate Poland’s historical honor, Law and Justice has brought to this delicate situation its bombastic nationalism and the crudest of tools: censorship and criminalization.

Poland’s share of the blame for the Holocaust has been the subject of long and painful debate. At various points before World War II, the country was a thriving center of Jewish learning and culture and a refuge from ill-treatment elsewhere in Europe. The 11th-century Polish ruler Władysław Herman welcomed Jews fleeing persecution in Spain, and guaranteed their safety. His successors upheld that guarantee. The Polish spirit of tolerance reached its apogee in the 16th and 17th centuries under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a period that moved the great Krakow rabbi Moses Isserles to write to a student: “Better a dry crust with peace–as it is here, where there is no fierce hatred–than in German lands. May it remain this way until the Messiah comes.”

The absence of “fierce” hatred, of course, doesn’t imply the complete absence of hatred. As Muszyński noted in his address, even in times of tolerance, “the life of Jews in Poland was not free from tensions, prejudices, mutual distrust, and various manifestations of hostile acts.” The archbishop was referring to the traditional, ethnic or religiously inspired, anti-Semitism that for long centuries stalked Jewish communities across the Continent and periodically exploded into pogroms and riots. The Law and Justice party, and others who wish to cast Poles as entirely innocent in the Holocaust, maintain that that traditional Jew-hatred had nothing to do with the Nazis’ race-based, systematic, and genocidal project.

Unlike in, say, France, Nazi-occupied Poland had no collaborationist government, and Poles had no say in the Nazi decision to locate the death camps on their soil. The Polish government-in-exile tried to alert the World War II Allies to horrors of the Holocaust (to no avail for much of the time). It is also true that in Poland, and only in Poland, the Nazis punished with death not only those who rescued Jews but also the loved-ones of rescuers. Despite that threat, thousands of Poles risked their lives to save individual Jews. Today, Poles make up a quarter of the more than 26,000 “Righteous Among the Nations” honored at Yad Vashem–the highest count among all nations.

Thus, the phrase “Polish death camps” is, indeed, “inaccurate, misleading, and hurtful,” as the Trump State Department noted it in its statement decrying the Law and Justice law. Yet the traditional anti-Semitism of Poles did at times merge or fuse with the racial anti-Semitism of their German occupiers, most notably in the 1941 Jedwabne massacre, which saw Polish villagers round up 340 of their Jewish neighbors–men, women, and children–and burn them in a locked barn. Poles, moreover, murdered an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Jews after liberation, including 42 Holocaust survivors in the village of Kielce. As one survivor recalled, upon returning home to Lodz, she overheard two Polish women say,“Look, look, how many dirty Jews are still alive. And they told us that Hitler had managed to exterminate all of them.”

Incidents such as these are a reminder that, to its victims, the ideological origins of anti-Semitism–whether “traditional” or race-based and modern–aren’t all that important. What matters is the result. As that great son of Poland, Karol Wojtyła, remarked on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, all forms of anti-Semitism “contradict the Christian vision of human dignity.”

Barring debate about these matters won’t help Poland step beyond the shadow of the Holocaust.

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